Chapter 7 evaluates the force of a first argument in favor of the Innateness Hypothesis: the argument from universals. We will distinguish various types of universals, and examples will be provided. We will first look back at the organization of the mental grammar and ask which parts of that system could be innate. It is then made clear that we need to critically examine when alleged universals can be safely used to support the Innateness Hypothesis. We learn that the argument from universals has to be applied with care and without falling into logical fallacies. We need to realize that alleged universal properties of languages may, firstly, be applicable more generally to cognitive systems that include language (in which case they are not language-domain specific) and, secondly, be caused by factors that have nothing to do with the proposed innate Universal Grammar that nativists postulate. To use a universal in support of the Innateness Hypothesis, it needs to be specific to language and not be explainable in terms of other factors. We also see how Chomsky’s ideas about what might be innate for language have changed over time.

While modern anthropology began in the late nineteenth century, we can place the origins of the subject to much earlier. Seventeenth-century figures include Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Hobbes. Also, the definition of humanity was changing. Were feral children fully human, and what about the ‘Orang Outang’? This chapter explores these figures, as well as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and others in anthropology and in the sociological tradition. It also looks at the ideas of polygenesis and monogenesis.